SoCal Rainfall: Good News, Bad News

By Douglas V. Gibbs

I am a resident, and lifetime native, of Southern California.  I grew up around Los Angeles, living in a bunch of those concrete jungle cities, moved to the City of Corona in the Inland Empire as a teen, spent half a decade in San Diego thanks to my service in the United States Navy, and now I have resided for the last 26 years in Murrieta. . . a large, hundred-thousand-plus citizen bedroom community just north of Temecula where the I-215 and I-15 meet, and just north of the San Diego County line.  We are a part of the Inland Empire, tucked in the southwest corner of Riverside County, a very warm part of Southern California during the Summer, where we are currently in the middle of a severe drought, in the middle of July (typically the driest month of the year for Southern California), and it is raining buckets.

The Angels baseball team in Anaheim are not used to rain delays in July, but today's game against the Red Sox got exactly that. . . a delay.  The Angels' delay was the first in 20 years.  The San Diego Padres got a rain delay too, their first since 2006.  Drivers and residents are not used to flash flood warnings during the middle of summer, nor sections of the freeway collapsing at the far east end of

Riverside County because all of the rain.  A number of areas have also experienced power outages, closed beaches (that one is a real shocker for the month of July), a mess-load of lightning strikes, flooded streets, and muggy and moist conditions that we are just not used to in Southern California, especially during the heat of Summer.  But, here we are, with a weekend full of thunderstorms, and large-drop rainfall, and a record downpour at that.  Well, a downpour for us.  Around a quarter of an inch to a third of an inch fell in the Los Angeles area on Saturday, and that was enough to encourage the newscasters to scream "Storm Watch 2015."  Still, it's our wettest July in over 130 years.

Every Californian I've talked to about the surprise rainfall has automatically responded, "We need it."  We are in a nasty drought, after all.  Too bad, probably unknown to most of the people I talk to, that 70% of this water will be immediately dumped into the Pacific Ocean, and out of the remaining 30%, only 10% of it will be used for human consumption.

Such is the topsy-turvy world of liberal left California, where the politicians cause problems, demand that we give them the authority to fix the problem they caused, give them money to throw at the problem they caused, and then gasp because we later find out that the taxpayer dollars went elsewhere and the problem that was a problem is now a bigger problem.

We have gas prices sitting between $4 and $5 per gallon while the rest of the nation pays less than three bucks for a gallon of gas because of a supply shortage.  We refuse domestic oil because it has too much carbon in it, we demand special blends that can only be refined in a limited number of locations, we have the highest fuel taxes in the nation, and then my fellow Californians scream that our high gas prices are all because of greedy oil companies.

Then, in the middle of a drought, we scream "Thank you" for the rainfall, but then support the environmental mafia that has litigated and regulated our water away from us by standing in the way of more reservoirs, aqua-ducts, and desalinization plants.  There are even laws on the books that limit how much water can be sent into Southern California.

The good news?

My lawn will be green for a while as the weeds come in, which will help me in my fight against the city's Code Enforcement who ticketed me earlier this year for having a dead lawn during a drought.  They require 20% living vegetation minimum, or if you have a lawn it must be 80% living, green grass.

This ticket follows the one I got in 2010 for over-watering my lawn, because water ended up on the sidewalk and flowed into the gutter.

Oh, and I bought this particular house back in 1989 because it isn't in a Home Owner's Association.  I didn't want the hassle of a bunch of busy bodies telling me what I was allowed to do, or not do, with my lawn.

I thought about putting out some barrels to collect some of this rain water, but I hear you can get arrested for doing that.

The rain is supposed to continue through Monday.  I am suspecting the morning drive on the freeways is going to be littered with so many accidents that it'll make the cars catching flame on the Cajon Pass as a wildfire roared across Interstate 15 one day before this storm hit us look like a minor event.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

Remote Part of I-10 Collapses Amid Heavy Rains in Southern California - Associated Press